


Sounds of Redemption

by CSLong



Category: STAR Wars VIII - Fandom, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Fandom
Genre: Child Abuse, Creepy Snoke (Star Wars), F/M, Gen, Growing, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Kylo Ren Redemption, POV Ben Solo, POV Kylo Ren
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-15 04:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 13,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13605819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CSLong/pseuds/CSLong
Summary: Some part of Ben, always wanted to go back. But how do you return, what does redemption sound like, when there has been so much loss?





	1. The Sound of Breaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So there isn't a whole lot of plot- I just wanted to poke around in Ben's head and see what came out. It assumes that Ben actually did go with Rey after killing Snoke, so nothing is true to the movie after that.

Snoke was dead.

The reality of it had yet to penetrate his consciousness; it was a frightful and looming truth.  He had dreamed of it; he had carried it with him for so long. It is unrealized hate, mixed with zeal and devotion and love, manifesting itself only in his unconscious longing, well-hidden from Snoke and even from himself.

And now Snoke was dead.

Snoke was dead. But Snoke’s voice still haunted him; the voice that echoed words of praise that thrilled him and some that shattered him. And he never knew which one would be waiting for him in Snoke’s presence.

He can hear Rey, somewhere outside of his cell, somewhere on this rebel base. She is fighting, and yelling, and arguing…about him. And it makes his head hurt. So, he curls up on the hard bed in his cell, his back to the bars, his face toward the wall. The cage is unnecessary, he won’t run, he has nowhere to run to. He focuses, trying to block her out, listening, desperately for the voice that was always there, for better or worse.

He can hear Rey yelling and arguing and fighting, bit of her conversations filtering through his hazy consciousness, _“He saved me…killed Snoke…I promised him…still good…”_

He squeezes his eyes, trying to block her from his mind, trying to sever the bond that had not died with Snoke, to no avail. Frantically, he searches the recesses of his mind, listening for the voice that had visited him as a boy. The watchful eyes that had tracked his every movement as a child, and spoke to his confused and isolated heart. He wants it back, somehow. He’s terrified at the thought that it may be gone forever, that that confident, menacingly paternal and possessive voice may  never visit him in his darkest places.

When he first heard the voice, it had always been tender, and it came louder than the raised voices of his father and mother in the next room- they always did argue a lot, both having such shy and retiring personalities. 

The voice was soothing, filled with promises and affirmation. “My special boy…I’m here…You’re not alone.”

It was always louder then the hiss of a Falcon door as it shut.  And he needs it so much now, to drown out Rey’s surging emotions.

He can still hear it, quiet and distance, menacing but comforting:

“My sweet boy…I will never leave you. No one will ever love you like me.”

*********

He misses Snoke. 

A truth that would make Snoke turn in his grave.

 _“Attachment and affection are weaknesses that you should have killed with Ben Solo.”_ He could hear the voice speaking through the aching loneliness, it strikes him like an angry serpent, but it’s a relief in his tumultuous mind.

“You should eat, Ben…” He ignores the voice trying to penetrate through the walls of his cell, or perhaps the voice was in the cell with him, he couldn’t tell.

 _Leave me alone_ , he thinks. He closes his eyes, desperately trying to scrape up what bits of Snoke remained in him.

He can’t let him go.

He hates him. But he needs him so.

 _“…Skywalker doesn’t see you the way I do…”_  
“That’s not true…”  
“He will make you weak, you know this to be true, boy.”

Boy, he always called him boy, until he called him Kylo Ren. He only called him Ben Solo when he wanted to hurt him, to tear him down, to lay bare his most weak and shameful parts

 _“He’s the greatest Jedi that ever lived.”  
“He fears you,”_ the voice had hissed back in the dark quiet of his hut. “ _The greatest Jedi who ever has been, and he fears you, the power that power that is coursing through your veins.”_  
“That’s…that’s not true…”

A question or a statement?  
  
“ _You see the way he looks at you, you sense it in the way he watches you…trust me, my young friend, he will turn on you…”  
“SHUT UP!”_  
  
It had flown from his mouth, and he had instantly regretted it, longed to take it back, knowing the isolation that would follow.  
  
“ _No,” he called out. “Please, I’m sorry…don’t…don’t go,” he had begged._  
  
“Ben please, you’re getting sick… you have to eat…” God, she’s so loud.   
  
_“Please….come back. Don’t leave me.”_  
  
Silence.

“Ben, please don’t shut me out…” she calls through the haze, her voice mixes with Snokes and with the pleading of young Ben Solo.

_“Please come back.”_

The same darkness, the same loneliness, the same feeling of floating unrooted through time and space; he always felt that when Snoke’s voice would sulk away; it was Snoke’s favorite punishment when Ben was little.

“Come back Ben,” she whispers into the cell.

 _“Please come back…”_ he had called out.

He remembers how it felt then, that time, when his friend disappeared for a week. And he suddenly saw everything he had been warned of. The way his uncle followed him with his eyes, the way he held him back in training, the way he coaxed the other students out and threw up walls and boundaries for him.

He saw it in a sparring match. He thought he was doing well, attacking with all the force he had, parrying, thrusting, pushing- he had lost himself in the sparring match, until he felt himself being forced away, thrown from the other student by the force. He looked up, shocked, at Luke, whose hand was outstretched, he looked at his nephew and recoiled.

That night he cried, lonely and isolated. Why had his mother sent him away? Why had Luke looked at him like he was a monster? What was wrong with him?

“ _They are afraid of you, they are afraid of the power that flows in your veins, the power they haven’t even told you…”_

A wave of relief rushes over him.

“I missed you,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” soothes the voice. “I’ll never leave you again.”

************

He wakes up in a new room- clean and sterile. People poke and prod him. Was he sick? Can’t  remember; his body feels heavy and numb, his mind sluggish. Rey would appear in and out of his line of vision.

He hates her.

He burns with anger every time he sees her. He had killed Snoke for her. The one who had always been there, his teacher, the man who saw him, and wasn’t afraid. He killed Snoke for her. Snoke had left him beaten, bloodied, and bruised, but he never left him alone, and he repays him by turning on him.

Every decision, every motivation, every choice, every action, every movement, had been drenched with the presence of Snoke. He had come to count on that voice in his head; pushing him, purging him of weakness. Now he could barely hear that voice, he had thrown it all away for a scavenger he now couldn’t bear the sight of. 

She smiles at him, and puts the slightest pressure on his hand, he jerks away, harshly, he clenches his teeth and snarls at her. He was a dog, who in a fit of madness, turned on his master. Turned on the hand that had fed him, trained him, kicked him and starved him. He never would know which one was coming, a treat or a kick- and now, he is desperate for either.

 


	2. The Sound of Unfolding

She comes back every day. He scowls at her everyday- too tired to speak. He feels his body wasting away, as if it had drawn strength from Snoke, as if it didn’t know how to be without him. Snoke helped untap nearly endless energy, so being too tired to lift his own head, is not something he is used to.

She sits down with a tray of food.

“Do you want some, Ben?”

He ignores her.

“The medic says your still not eating.”

He glares at her, harder. She lets out a sigh and a soft shrug.

“Okay, I just can’t imagine that the supplements are very good.” She looks down at the bland bread and grey mush thoughtfully. “All though, maybe not much worse than this.”

He closes his eyes and tries to sleep, anything to escape that lilting voice, and that name that stings like salt in a wound, over and over.

“Ben….Ben…Ben…Ben…”

It’s painful; this unfolding, and he wonders if it will kill him, and he thinks, maybe that won’t be a bad thing.

*******

She comes again…and again…and again…like an annoying, winged pest. So loud…so bright…too bright, he can see it even when he’s sleeping.

“I know you’re scared Ben…”

“Stop…” is he saying it or thinking it. He feels so disconnected from the body around him that he can’t tell.

“You’re afraid…”

“Shut up.”

_“You have too much of your father’s heart in you.”_

The part that made him afraid, the deeply human part of him, the part that was named Ben; that part was afraid.

“It’s okay,” she says, voice soft but sure and certain.

It’s not…

_“Power protects you, fear strips power away.”_

“I’m here, Ben.”

He thinks he must have screamed at her, because she stumbles back, eyes wide and afraid. And she’s gone.

Like Ben.

Like Han.  
  
Like Snoke.  
  
Like Kylo Ren.

What else did he have left?

Just a scared, lonely, drowning stranger, a stranger with too much Vader in him, a stranger with too much of his father’s heart in him, and not enough of either to truly belong anywhere.


	3. The Sound of Unlearning

She comes back and somewhere, in the tempest of his heart, he is relieved. He thought she would stay gone, after that look of fear. She must have seen it, or felt it, he felt the bond had numbed somehow in his sickness, but it was still there. He even turns his head to look at her.

“I flew an X-Wing today,” she says, breaking off a piece of bread and chewing it. She speaks with food in her mouth- he had never met someone who did that; in every stage of his life, either in the Senate with his mother, or the temple with Luke, or his training with Snoke, appearance and etiquette mattered.

“My first…” she continues. “I think Poe was making me wait because he really wants to hold onto that “Best Polite in the Resistance” title that he’s got…” She laughs and then looked at him, expectantly. “But you know what I’d really like to try? That command shuttle of yours… you know…” She held her arms up and out, like a “Y” mimicking the shape of the ship. “You know which one I’m talking about?”

Did he smile? He meant too. He doesn’t know why, because yesterday he wanted her out. He feels a sense of something slipping, something being cut away tendon by tendon.

She looks at him, a somber, but not unpleasant expression falling on her face as she tentatively raises a hand and brushes a piece of hair from his forehead. His insides jolt, like a piece of him settling somewhere it should be inside him.

*******  
God knows he hates Ben Solo. The weak, pathetic, sniveling boy who couldn’t bring himself to sit up, like a bed-ridden invalid, who wallowed in self-pity like a child, crying for the master he hated.

Snoke would never let him behave like this. And he felt the nagging sense that he was letting him down. The fact that they hadn’t even bothered with restraints was an insult. He feels like a castrated dog, harmless. The next time she comes in, he sits up, embarrassed at the effort it takes. She pretends not to notice, doesn’t offer to help him, he is grateful for that.

She offers him some of her food. He takes a few bits and then feels sick, not even remembering the last time he had solid food.

Oh god…oh god..oh god…

The wave of nausea is overwhelming, and she sees it.

“Get out…” he growls, his body heaving. “Get out… get out…”She doesn’t look surprised, she looks annoyed.

“Ben…”

He opens his mouth to say something but then stops, doubling over. She quickly grabs a waste basket by the bed and holds it under Ben, her hand grazes over his back as he vomits the little bit of food into the basket.

“It made me throw up the first few times too,” she says with a laugh.

He doesn’t hear her. Shame courses through his body, more repulsive then the bile at the back of his throat. She tries to reach out and touch his arm, but he jerks away angrily, turning his back to her fully. He doesn’t want to look at her face, but he could imagine it…God he hates Ben Solo so damn much.

*********

Today his mother comes in, he hadn’t seen her yet.

She doesn’t say anything. She just stands by the bed. Her face is filled with uncertainty, conflict. Did she see her son? Or did she see the man who killed her husband? He meets her gaze unflinchingly, and he feels the small prick of Kylo Ren thrashing against his ribcage. Kylo could look her in the eye without blinking; Ben can’t bear to, the pain, fury and love would overwhelm him.

*********  
He tries eating again on his own hoping next time she comes back his full weakness wouldn’t be on display for her to see.

*********

“We still have it you know…”

He looks at her confused.

“The bond,” she says, elaborating. “It’s still there. Did you know?” He doesn’t answer. “I don’t know that I quite believe that it was all Snoke.”

He lets out a derisive snort.

“I wouldn’t be surprised, he was an accomplished liar and arrogant beyond belief…” he inwardly flinches at his own words. Rey looks at him, but the question dies on her lips, and she slowly continues as if nothing happened.

“Yeah, I think maybe the medicine they gave you to calm you down and help you sleep, may have dulled it a bit,” she says. “And I think that, because…because of …where you’re at…it’s confused, but it’s still there, Ben.”

He nods. He wonders if she’s happy about it. He wonders if he is.

********

The sound of her arguing for him doesn’t bother him as much as it did when he first arrived. Now he sat in a room, waiting to be executed or imprisoned or exiled to a desert planet with no hope of escape. He doesn’t even know what to hope for in the moment. He is surprised that he doesn’t want to die, but he also knows he will be insulted by anything other than a death sentence.

His mother regards him wearily, but she is nothing if not fair, he expects no special treatment from her, but he doesn’t expect any special punishment either, despite how deeply personal his wounds have been for her. He scans the small room of leaders, small because he had seen to the death of many of them. No formal government, yet, so it was a room of his enemies listening to the undeniable facts.

“He killed Han Solo…he helped destroy the Hosnian System…he tortured Poe Dameron…severely wounded Finn…kidnapped Rey…” Not a lot of it was up for debate; but one wouldn’t know that to listen to Rey. Everyone in the room believed deeply in Rey’s affinity for the light- but they didn’t quite see what he sees. There isn’t only an affinity for the light, but a deep comfort in the grey; it was the world that allowed her to see him as both be the monster who killed his father and the man who stood back to back with her against Snoke. She lives in the grey in a way that seemed wholly unique. It was disorienting and frustrating.

Afterwards, she comes to visit him in his cell.

“You’re getting out Ben…I told them about the bond, that helped I think. You’ll be on house arrest, in a sense, and they’ll want…information,” she said slowly, cautiously. “About the First Order, that may be helpful for us…”

Of course, Ben Solo is no doubt a turncoat.

“But you’ll get out Ben…you can…you can stay here with me. I’ll help you. They said I can help you, train with you when you’re stronger.” She looks at him intently. “Luke said it would be a good idea…he feels guilty for not…not trusting me…when I told him…”

“You should’ve left me there…” he says, his voice rough and harsh. “You should’ve left me to die with Snoke.”

“Ben,” she looks at him, her eyes pleading and pained. “Ben that’s not better. It’s not. That’s not your ending Ben. That’s... that’s not how this ends for you.”

Ending…it sounds so peaceful, so much easier then navigating existence without Snoke. The thought of a future, separate from him, terrifies him to his core. He hadn’t been afraid in a very long time, conflicted and unsure yes, but not afraid. He always knew that he would die on a battlefield, or be pushed too far by Snoke, or stabbed in the back by some underling, and it never made him afraid. But now, suddenly the looming possibility of…anything…seemed so much more cruel.


	4. The Sound of Recognition

He hates Ben- but Rey doesn’t. And it confuses him. Ben had never been enough for anyone- too much Vader in Ben for his parents, not enough Vader in Ben for Snoke.

But Rey thinks Ben is…funny. He stumbles upon it by accident, a dry comment here or there, and she laughs loud, and full-bodied.

Now, he finds himself tentatively trying to make her laugh. It sparks a thrill in his chest and he smiles too, he can’t help it when her eyes light up.

Ben, he recalls, also likes to read. The library is small at the rebel base, but a part of Rey will always be a scavenger; so books turn up in his room in a steady stream. Some she borrows from other people at the base, some she finds on travels.

He finds it odd when she asks if she can tinker with a droid in his room, while he reads. He, of course, says yes. He is even more taken aback when she asks if he will read to her.

“The History of the Clone Wars?”

She nods urgently. It only later occurs to him that he had an expensive education, grew up in a home with a senator with access to many cultures and people. Rey did not. And he wondered if she could read, and suddenly the request to read to her felt like an immense privilege. They spend many a night in his room, sometimes she cleans bits of metal, or repaires weapons, other times she just sits across from him in his bed, head leaned against the wall, listening intently.

One day he asks her, carefully, hoping he hits target of “kindly”.

“Can you read, Rey?”

He sees a flash of insecurity cloud her expression. She looks away. Is she embarrassed? Should he have said anything? She looks up and meets his eyes, seemingly recovered.

“Not…not well…”

He doesn’t respond, he looks down at the heavy book in his hand. He wants to say something, something that told her it didn’t matter, but that was a lie, it did matter.

“Uh…would…do you want…I could help…you..” the words fumble out, he doesn’t know if it’s an insult- he would take it as an insult- but he doesn’t mean it as one.

He is surprised when she nods and scoots over closer to him, and he’s overwhelmed by the faith and trust she is showing him. Being needed was something he was unfamiliar with, needing someone still more- and she did both. And he knew, it was not natural. He had seen in her mind that her ability to trust did not come from an abundance of trustworthy people, it was a conscious choice she made, it was an act of courage. 

So, their nights take a new shape, and as she struggles in front of him, flushed with embarrassment or frustration as she stumbles over words, somehow, it’s one of the most intimate and human things he has ever seen.  It fascinates him to watch her slap the pages, and snap at him when he corrects her. It’s all so new and unfamiliar and he held it, precious, in his hand, turning it over and studying it. He never imagined that weakness and defect could be put on casual display in such a way. He was conditioned to recoil from need. But he is curious about it.

Ben is curious, and funny, and not a bad teacher.  Snoke had never told him that. To Snoke, he moved between the two extremes of the second coming of Vader or utterly useless. But this was simple, something he never had the chance to know of himself, because it wasn’t practical or useful for Snoke’s purposes, he had no use for curious, or funny, but he found, oddly, they weren’t so horrible.

*******

She likes to touch Ben. He wonders why, but he doesn’t ask, for fear it may stop.

It had started slowly, testing the physical boundaries that he had. She started like one might approach a neglected animal- carefully, slowly, asking for permission without words. She would touch his knee, brush his knuckles, lay her head on his shoulder. He would sense her stop and read his response, and decide whether or not to hold the contact.

He doesn’t love it, or hate it, but he needs it. It reminds him that as everything inside him is cracking and breaking away, he is still human, solid and here.

She is his friend, he thinks. But he grasps for words to describe what exactly they mean to one another. What do you call a friend, to whom you are bonded so deeply you can hear one another across the galaxy, who you at times resent but to whom you are eternally indebted, who he feels as though he would do anything for, but who is so unbearably intertwined with the light that she is blinding.

“Ben,” she says, looking at him from across the pile of springs and screws and metal. “Are you here with me?”

He is and he isn’t- if there was ever a sentence that summed up his entire existence that would be it.

She reaches out and cups his face gently in her calloused hands. As soon as her thumb hits the corner of his mouth, he leaps up to his feet. He suddenly feels sick. She doesn’t look hurt, she lowers her hand and lets him back away from her. He thinks he says something to her, but he hurries out of the main hangar and toward his room. He can’t see her or hear her through the red haze lighting Han’s face, the sickening sound of his lightsaber igniting, an expression of mingled shock, pain and love, the feel of his father’s fingers sliding away from his face as he falls.


	5. The Sound of Loss

His mother seeks him out more. She speaks to him, stilted and measured, but she speaks to him. It’s exhausting, like starting from square one, he misses Rey when she’s on her missions.  He wonders if he should tell her that when he sees her again.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“It’s been a few months, are you adjusting.”

“Yes.” 

“Luke asks about you,” his mother says, sitting across from him. She doesn’t look nervous, she never does. She looks strained, like she’s trying to old together too many ripping pieces.

“He knows where I am.”

“He’s afraid…”

He doesn’t try to hold back the derisive laugh. “So was I.”

He is angry that evening, and Rey sees it right away. Not that he was ever hard to read. He knew he wasn’t naturally stoic. Lately, he had been frozen and numb, but not stoic. He thinks maybe that’s why Rey isn’t put off by his bad mood; she could sense something different about the anger in him. It wasn’t just Kylo Ren’s fits of rage, it was Ben’s anger too.  She makes no attempt to stay it, to talk him out of it.

He is angry, so angry, but it’s something else; something new that Ben was feeling deep inside him, something a bit like loss; a profound sense of nothing has happened as it should have, it was so oppressively irreversible.

“You’re angry at her.”

“I don’t get to be,” he spits back. He’s standing, head bent and bobbing on his feet, a ball of molten, concentrated conflict. “I killed her husband, the love of her life is dead, and I did that.”  He sees her wince, he forgets, sometimes, Rey loved him too.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t be angry Ben,” she says.

Oh yes, he thinks. The convenient world she lives in where he could be both the monster who kills his father and son who misses him- in her world they were not opposites pitted against one another, they were cohabitants.

He prefers the duality of either-or; a trait shared by Jedi and Sith, alike.

She steps closer to him, he backs away. She sighs and looks up at him. She doesn’t feel small. He does.

“Why are you angry at her?

His black mess of tangled hair blocks her from view; so he squeezes his eyes tight, thinking perhaps this would push the tears back behind his eyes.

“Tell me…”

He can’t, the words catch in his throat and his heart pounds. How could it be that , in this base surrounded by good people, he was exhausted by a fear he never felt in the midst of the First Order?

“I killed him Rey. I don’t get to feel anything about it…”

He sees her eyes narrow, and she steps yet closer, bending at an angle so that she could see his face fully.

“Yeah,” she says. “You did. It was horrible and it tore you apart. But your suffering won’t make up for it, nothing can; the cost is incomprehensible.” Was she comforting or berating him? Maybe neither. “So don’t kill yourself trying to; you take this gift you’ve been given to try again, and you do better.” She says it like it’s so simple. Maybe, in her world of grey, it is that simple.

“I’m a monster.” That was simple too.

“You’ve done monstrous things,” she agrees. “But it’s not the whole story, Ben. It’s not the whole of it.”  
  
He shakes, his body feels like a bundle of raw nerves, stripped of any protection.

“Ben, you need to see the full story; if you don’t the guilt is useless, if you don’t you’ll go from a monster to a shell. You should feel guilt, you should feel bad, but you should feel it with the whole story. That’s what will keep you human.”

She softly places a hand on his forearm, and she moves close, so close now, the hair that covered his face tangles with hers.

“Ben…” she whispers. “Can you show me?”

His insides thrash and howl and throw themselves against their cage. She wouldn’t find his mind the same as it had been, after Snoke had built his castles there. But he knows what she will find there, the sickness, the darkness, the evil that provoked Luke to raise lightsaber against him.

But some part of him, the part that did whatever it needed to survive, the part that tells the body to fight even as it bleeds out beyond hope, that part nodded.

He watches her raise her hands lowly, delicately. She presses a palm against his jaw, her fingers gently brush the hair that falls over his ears.  He closes his eyes and he can feel her standing there, at the forefront of his consciousness, waiting for the door to open. She could have forced herself in at that point; the door that kept him sane, that separated those depths from his day-to-day, is barely on it’s hinges. But all the same, she waits.

Her feelings mix with his as she enters into his mind, reading, looking, listening, taking in the dry and barren landscape. He can hear her gasping to take in deep breathes, he can feel his own lungs squeezing with anxiety.

She feels the anger, he can sense that. But as her fingers brush gently through the inside of his mind, she stops and feels more intently, beyond the anger, beyond the rage, and deep and pulsing place of grief, fear and loss.

He is afraid. Afraid that all the broken bits are shattered beyond redemption.

He is burdened by the nauseating awareness that all that had been done could not be undone- the permanence of it was overwhelming.

He sees all the paths he took, knowing they can’t be untaken, and bearing the knowledge that if one of a million decisions, from many people, had been different, then everything could have been different. How many decision, some in his control and some out, irreparably impacted the fate of Ben Solo.

He could feel her buckling, either physically in front of him or inside his head, he reaches out trying to stable her in the midst of it.

She feels out of control, as though she is being tossed from wave to giant wave. She feels helpless against the forces around her. He feels that too. He knows it’s only partly true though.

He feels her look down the paths that led from then to now; to signs ignored that spoke of the hooks that Snoke was sinking into him. She feels his relief when Snoke was the first to recognize the tempest of power brewing within little Ben. He felt seen, understood. She feels his betrayal, when he finds out the truth of his bloodline, like a stab to the heart. She feels his fear, his questioning, as he tries to place the look in his mother’s eye as she hugs him before he departs with Luke, she looks at him like she doesn’t recognize him.  Through it all, the voice of Snoke was whispering in the darkness, confirming every worst fear and comforting him in the midst of it. What if he had stayed? What if he had told them about the voice of his friend? What if Luke had asked him about the darkness he sensed? What if he had been Ben to someone, not shrouded in either the fear or the coveting of the darkness that ran in his veins.

He feels her anger flare, as his abates. Was she taking it on? Was he somehow transferring it to her? He didn’t want too. But he takes a moment to listen, to feel the thrumming of her feelings, and he sees that she is angry, but not at him.

He hears her gasp and strain against the darkness. He tries to pull away, but she holds firm.

She is angry for him. He hears her thoughts reverberating through his tattered psyche. This doesn’t just HAPPEN to children, not by accident; in the same way children don’t happen to become scavengers, who had to learn to sleep with one eye open because there was not a single person to advocate for her. No, people make choices, people let these things happen to children.

He grows angry again too- but was it hers or his? Their shared loneliness bleeds together, so he can’t extract his from hers.

She is angry for the little boy whose destiny was tied to so many, who was groomed insolation by a predator. She is angry that Leia and Han didn’t fight to keep him close, exhaust every option before sending him away and confirming all of Snoke’s worst lies to Ben.  She is angry at Luke, who sensing the darkness, struck out against his nephews instead of reaching out- how could he not have known, great Jedi that he was? Rey wasn’t there but a moment before she felt the overwhelming sense of fear and lostness inside of Ben, how could Luke have missed it?

Suddenly the connection breaks and he’s sinking into darkness. She tries to hold him up, but she too is exhausted from her trapes, so she sinks down with him. They cling to each other, panting, sweating, crying.

“Forget the past…kill it if you have too.” Snoke had told him that. But he never warned him that what you kill, sometimes, you also have to mourn.


	6. The Sound of Rebuildling

Rose is one of the first people to talk to him, besides Rey. It didn’t matter that he had been there for several months, most of the other rebels keep a wide berth of weary distance from the man who killed, or oversaw the killing, of many of their friends.

She doesn’t mean to talk to him, but she does. All he sees are legs hanging down from a ceiling shaft, a ladder precariously set beneath them. He attempts to step around the ladder without disturbing the owner of the legs, but then a voice calls out.

“Oh good…I dropped that wrench there could you…”

He hears her realize who she is talking to and her voice falters. She looked down at the floor, finding the wrench under the ladder. He slowly leans down and picks it up. He meets her gaze, she’s trying not to look afraid. He hands it up to her.

“Thank you,” she says slowly.

“You’re welcome.”

He sees it in her eyes; like many of the people here, Kylo Ren had taken something important from her. So when she waves cautiously at him from across a table at dinner, he’s surprised, so surprised he almost forgets to wave back. And then a week later she approaches him, head high, mouth set; she must be afraid with how hard she was trying not to look it.

“You’re a pilot, right?”

“Uhh…somewhat.”

She nods, as if that had made a decision of some kind. “Good, come with me.” He obeys, following the tiny woman to one of the hangars on the base, inside there were 7 X-wings that looked as though they were ready for the scrap yard.  “We can’t afford to have any of these down, and I am not as familiar with the inner workings of these little ones…but hey beggars can’t be choosers.”

He quickly finds that she barely needs him, and wonders why she would ask him to help her, other then to reach things she couldn’t with ease. But he doesn’t fight her. He sits with her and hands her tools and listens to her talk through the schematics she is less familiar with.

“…Now my sister…” she says. “ _She_ was a pilot. One of the best.”

He sees her gently caress the crescent moon around her neck, longingly.

“She…she was a hero you know.”

She says it defiantly, daring, if testing him to react, but still not cruel.

“I didn’t know.”

She nods, her eyes intently fixed on the mess of wires she had pulled out.

“She took out a whole Dreadnaut, so that we, the resistance, could escape.” Her voice is gently, shockingly unaccusatory.

“I heard about that,” he says. “Caused a lot of problems for the First Order.”

He doesn’t really know if that last part was true, he was not as intimate with the military side of things, his obsession with Luke and then Rey proved to be a fulltime job. But she smiles, softly, she seems to like the thought of the First Order frantic and scared on account of her sister. He watches her, weighing something in her mind, she stops fiddling with the exposed wires, and then looks at him.

“She used to say it was never too late to do the right thing…” he doesn’t respond. “I guess… I guess she’s right.”

She goes back to the wires above her head.  And he feels ashamed, because he’s not there because it’s “right”- he isn’t a noble defector like Finn- he’s not there because he believes in the resistance, he’s there because he has nowhere else to go.

Rose continues to smile and wave at him, and even talk to him, especially when Rey and Finn would be gone on a mission. Finn was uncomfortable with the whole thing at first, but, somehow, despite being equally conditioned and brainwashed as a Storm Trooper, he became a good person. Now, sometimes, even Finn gives him a nod and when they pass.

It’s unsettling, and even something as simple as a wave makes him feel a rush of anxiety, and he wondered how inhuman he had become, a wave felt like he was an imposter, an inhuman creature trying to play pretend.

********

He is laughing; loud and hard, and can’t remember the last time he did that.  
  
“Come on man, how accurate is it, tell me Ben!” The pilot stands up straight, shoulders back and head up.

“Tell me, sir,” Dameron says in an accent, high and sharp. “Is this a like visage of General-Stick-Up-His-Ass?”

He marches and waddles around the table, and his laugh joins in with Finn and Rey, and he nods urgently, confirming that it was, in fact, accurate.

It isn’t his first time laughing, of course, but it had been creaky, dusty and unused before; this is the first time he laughs like he could trust it.

It doesn’t sound like Kylo, it sounded like Ben.

********

 

Luke asks if he will walk with him. Rey is gone, flying and shooting the First Order out of the sky. He misses her. He still hasn’t told her that, he misses her more then he misses Snoke.

Luke is silent as they walk along the rocky planes surrounding the base. It’s a pretty enough planet, not a lot of green, but a lot of places to hide. He can feel the emotion trembling in the heart of his uncle.

“I don’t know that I trust you, Ben.”

He is amused by the statement.

“I didn’t think you did,” he says. They walk in silence a bit more before he turns and looks at Luke. “And I KNOW I don’t trust you.”

Luke nods. Skywalkers can take grudges to their graves, especially ones against themselves.  They don’t speak again on this walk.

But soon they go on another one. He isn’t thrilled about the company, but it’s the only way they let him leave the base; even if he isn’t a threat anymore, he isn’t anything anymore.

“I told her not to go to you.”

“I know.”

Luke continues to look forward, but he feels that Luke is looking at him.

“I shouldn’t have done that. I…I should have had more faith in her…in you…in the light.”

He stops and glares at Luke, he feels that surge of anger for him rising hot in his throat.

“No uncle, you shouldn’t have,” he says. “I still belong to the dark, I still belong to him.”

But did he? The words rang hallow in his mouth, not weighted with conviction as he thought they were. He was conditioned to believe he belonged to Snoke, and no one else. Did he know how to not believe that? Was he like one of those ridiculous fish who get so used to swimming in a trapped area they don’t know how to swim beyond their imagined barrier, even if it is no longer there?

Luke looks at him for the first time. He tries to straighten, to sneer, or growl, to smirk. He tries to summon up Kylo but finds he is missing.

Panic…

Snokes is gone.

Kylo is gone.

Vader is gone.

Ben can’t look his uncle in the eyes…Ben can’t bear it.

“I regret so much, Ben.”

He says it, easily but sincerely. It meant very little, almost nothing, but almost nothing is still something; when your rebuilding broken things, even the small bits matter.

****

He starts to feel a little more human again, when he starts to move. He has been feeling disconnected and unattached to his body, his physical self; an odd and unfamiliar feeling; he had spent years disciplining his body in every sense of the world, but lately he has felt out sync with it. So when he picks up a sparing staff, he feels less like a feeble, lost sheep. His body is weaker, he notices as he jumps back out of range from Rey’s swing, his stamina less fortified.

But he doesn’t mind. His training with Snoke had become an addiction of sort; each time he would crawl back ready to see how much punishment his mind and body could take, how much he could grit his teeth through, ready to prove he was worthy.  But now his body doesn’t allow that, and he realizes, as he blocks and parries, that, at some point, he may have even enjoyed this.

He doesn’t mind that she beats him. He thought he might, that he’d feel weak and pitied and powerless. But she collapses on the ground flushed and winded and happy, her sweaty shoulder grazing his, and he’s not upset that he lost.


	7. The Sound of Reckoning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sex! Avert eyes from chapter should that offend you! :) Love you guys and thanks so much for the support and encouragement and Kudos :)

He still doesn’t sleep through the night; ever. No matter how much progress he feels like he’s making, when night falls, he feels like he’s back at square one. He closes his eyes and sees the face of his father, and is filled with a deep, sinking sense of despair, because when so much damage has been done, why even bother?

Sometimes he forgets. He thinks, maybe, he can be human again. He convinces himself that, the whole story, is not just that he killed his father; the whole story is a scared little boy and a predator waiting to sink his teeth into him. He can almost convince himself in the light of day. But then he closes his eyes and sees the face of his father, grinning up as he throws a dark-haired little boy into the air and makes spaceship sounds; the face of his father, waving from the cockpit of the Falcon; the face of his father, a look of pain and soft shock, a surprised exhale, a gentle hand on his face, slowly falling away; the face of his father, when he catches his own in a shiny surface.

He wants to blame Snoke- if he can’t blame Snoke, what possible hope could he have? But he knows, deep in his splintered spirit, that he made the choice, when the time came he didn’t hesitate, and he executed Han Solo.

He dreams it over and over, and he can never stop it. He thinks he can for a brief moment, in his sleep laden brain, he forgets that this particular path has been fixed- no matter how much redemption he finds, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how much good he does or doesn’t do, Han will still be dead.

_“What do you think you’ll see?”_

_“The face of my son.”_

_“You have too much of your father’s heart in you…young Solo.”_

And he remembers why that mask felt so good, why power felt so good. He longs for Kylo Ren because he feels the ache in his chest will destroy him. Kylo can live knowing what he did to Han Solo, but Ben can’t live knowing what he did to his father.

*****

Sometimes, Rey comes to him, the tempest of self-loathing washing over her and waking her in the night. He looks up as she slips through the door. She doesn’t say anything, she never does. She lays on the edge of his bed.

Sometimes she faces him, and he can see the distinct angles of her face in the dark. Sometimes she presses her forehead to his, and he just feels her breathe against his skin, and he tries to match his breathe to hers- in and out, in and out.

Sometimes she takes his hands in hers, she holds them both to her lips, cupping them preciously, trying to wrap as much of them up as she can.

Sometimes he doesn’t want her to leave, but he doesn’t want her to see him, so he turns his back to her, so she crawls in behind him and she gently lays her arm over the one he hugs to his chest and she holds him; a comic sight, he imagines. He towers over her and he’s embarrassed that somehow, it does make him feel safer.

Sometimes, on rare nights, where she feels him slipping into the darkest recesses of his shame, she opens her own mind to him, letting him see and touch her weak and lonely places, the places of fear and hurt and anger, and somehow the act of mutual vulnerability makes him feel better, less pathetic.

But mostly, she just lays beside him and she feels his feelings with him- all the rage and regret, and he watches her cry for him, and she squeezes his hand.

“You’re not alone.”  


It sounds so different from her then it does from Snoke.

****

The first time she kisses him, he doesn’t know what to do. He is confused, because he knows they mean something to each other, but it’s so intimate and profound, he dares not name it, he thinks maybe there isn’t even a name for it. She holds his hand often, she lays her head on his shoulder, and she holds him until he sleeps. She fights with him and for him, and she fights with him for him.

She’s a friend, an anchor, a grounding force that reminds him what it means to be human in his skin, but more then anything else, she’s Rey; the person of Rey who chooses to be in his life and chooses to trust him, who went into the lions den because she trusted that he could be saved.   It’s all of that, and it’s not enough to call it romantic, it doesn’t cover what her existence means to him, and the way it coaxes him back to his own, the way it resuscitates parts of him he thought were dead.  And he thinks, maybe, it means something to her, the way he looks at her, and the way he trusts her.

He doesn’t know what one calls a relationship that looks like that. But she also holds his hand, she touches his face, he doesn’t cut off too much of his hair because she mentions, casually, that she likes it long, and he teaches her to read.

So he doesn’t know what to call it. And then one day, after he swipes her feet out from under in a sparring match, and he kneels beside her to make sure she’s okay, she kisses him, shy and quick and impulsively. She leans back on her arms, tentatively looking at him. He sees insecurity pass through her eyes, maybe because he doesn’t respond? He didn’t really have time though, it was over before it happened.

He looks at her laying back on the grass. Snoke, and even Luke, engrained it in him that what he wants doesn’t really matter- sacrifice of the self at the altar of the force or at the altar of power. And in any of that he never really considered what he actually wanted.

He knows he loves Rey. That was never a question for him. But when she kisses him he hears Snoke’s voice loud in his head. He should be happy, he should feel something akin to joy when she touches his lips, but he hears Snoke’s voice.

“Ben Solo is weak, useless; he must be put to death…”

Kylo Ren feels powerful and sure and certain; Ben Solo feels fear and joy when she put her lips to his

_“No one will ever be there for you like me…”_

Rey looks at him, carefully.

“Was that all right, Ben?”

He swallows, his throat is dry and scratchy.

“Uh…Uh..yes…”

He wants to lash out, to run, to push away, or else kiss her back hard and dominant and strong, anything to push away from this place where his heart lay trembling in her hand, still bruised and bleeding. And then he is overwhelmed, he realizes that she is doing the same thing, offering a scarred, and battered heart to him, a heart that ached with loneliness and the insecurity that comes with getting left behind, and here she was, offering it to him- and, somehow, that makes him brave.

*****

The first time they have sex; they don’t. He is afraid, deeply afraid to want something, to desire something other then power and a legacy. And the fact that he is getting it, makes his insides twist with guilt. There has to be a balance, a payment he makes for what he has done, and an amazing, beautiful, strong woman kissing a path across his scarred chest doesn’t factor into the balance.

He is afraid that in the moment, if he feels her around him, soft and willing and ready, he’ll forget, even only for a moment, what he has done and who he is; like an imposter, pretending to be just a man in love with a woman, and not someone who is impossibly lucky that she even looks at him without hate. And he’s afraid that in that moment, baptized in her touch, intoxicated from the taste of her, he will, become Kylo Ren, the man who could live with all he has done; and Kylo Ren does not deserve her.

He holds to that self-loathing like a life line, it reminds him he’s human; because a human who has done what he’s done, deserve to hate themselves. 

So before he could lose himself in her, he pulls away and flips her onto her back. He looks down at her open face her golden eyes, and beautiful lips open and swollen from his kisses, quivering with desire. He can’t forget, but he wants her, and he wants her to know that, he’ll deny Kylo Ren but he won’t deny her. So he kisses his way hungrily down her body, a thrill of pleasure pulsing through him as she arches and moans his name.

…Even this feels like too much, the simple privilege of bringing her pleasure, of tasting her intimately, being trusted in such a vulnerable place, the soft pleasure of her digging her nails into his head, it’s more perfect then he could ever deserve.

So that’s what he does, the second and the third time; and he’s satisfied that she’s breathily moaning his name and that he can make her feel good.

But the fourth time, she notices. She notices that he rolls away bringing his hand down to find the sensitive spot between her legs he feels that he is getting to know well. And this time she stops him. She grabs his forearm and pulls him back up her body. He takes her in, face smeared with engine oil, curls sticking to the side of her face, her eyes intense, she’s just too beautiful and too perfect.

“I’m not,” her voice snaps, not angry but reprovingly.

Had he said it out loud?

“What?”

She leans back on her forearms, bringing her face up inches from his. He wants to shrink away from her gaze, but he can’t.

“Don’t…” she says. “Please, Ben…I see, I hear you, I try not too but you’re so loud. I’m not perfect, I’m not an angel, I’m…just Rey, a scavenger, an orphan from Jakuu.”

His gaze drops, fixed on the curve of her shoulder.

“Ben,” she says slowly. “Please this won’t work if…if you see me as this perfect angel that descends from the heights of heaven, who deigns to love you out of charity or your redemption. I can’t be that. I need you to see me.” She swallows, her voice is trembling with emotion, but she’s looking at him strong and sure.

“Rey I…I’m sorry… you shouldn’t have to…”

“Ben,” she says, exasperated. “This isn’t about what I have to do, that’s what I’m telling you. I want to be with you. I don’t feel so…so lonely when I’m with you; the only time I feel lonely is when you put me up on that damn pedastool.” She presses her forehead to his, and runs the back of her fingers against his jaw, up to his hair line. “I want to be with you Ben, but I can’t if…if you’re going to insist on punishing yourself forever.”

Her words are whispered into the darkness, and it doesn’t take much more then that for him to dip against her, pressing her into the mattress beneath him. His mouth eagerly finds hers in the dark. He feels her arms snake under his, her hands gripping tightly into his shoulders. He focuses on her, on the feel of her beneath him, the feel of her body against his own skin. She wraps her legs around his waist and the feel of her against him awakens a growl, deep and feral in the back of his throat…

_“You’re a monster…” she had told him that night in the forest._

He tries to refocus, to shake the words off as her hands move and dip along the planes of his back, as he kisses along her collar bone, as she grinds her body against his, trembling with want.

_“No one will ever love you like me…” Snoke had whispered to him in the nights he lay confused and alone on his bed._

He’s so much bigger then her, what if he crushes her.  What if he doesn’t notice that he’s hurting her? He eases both hands behind her back and he lays beside her, he brings her close, relishing the feel of her breasts again him, and then, he maneuvers her on top of him. She doesn’t question but adapts immediately to the new position.

_“…Son of Darkness…Heir apparent to Darth Vader…”_

“Rey…” it spills from his mouth like a prayer, his fingers digging into her hips, as she grinds slowly against him, rocking against him, her hands on his chest, helping her balance as she lowers herself onto him. She let’s out a gasp of pleasure and pain as he enters her, and he thinks he might black out, as his own pleasure mixes overwhelmingly with hers. He wonders does she feel him too, his pleasure, and his conflict?

_“…Snoke is just using you for your power. He’ll crush you…”_

She begins to move, slowly at first, up and down. And he thinks it’s not a pedastool at all, but that the sight of her above him, all trust and naked vulnerability and pleasure, breathily moaning his name into the air, is, in fact, the most beautiful thing in the whole galaxy. His hand travels up her stomach and to her one of her breasts, when she arches into his touch he brings another hand up to the bend of her back, he pushes, in what he hopes is a gentle urging. She responds and rocks faster against him, she looks down at him, as if to make sure he’s still enjoying it, and she smiles at him. And that is enough to bring him to the edge, he teeters…

 _“You ARE a monster…”_  
“Yes I am…”  
“Murderous snake…”  
“You lost…”

“Ben…” he can hear her call his name, she says it beautifully, reverently almost, her hand on his face again, urgently running through his hair and over his eyes, tenderly.  She looks down at him, pleadingly, seeing the war in his eyes. “Ben…please…please stay with me.”

He sits up in bed, so he’s no longer flat beneath her but eyes to eye, he holds her close as she moves up and down. He feels the inside of her pulsing against him, his eyes remain locked on hers. He wants to look away, it’s terrifying.

“Ben…” this time it’s a strangled breath, and he knows she’s close. He can feel it and see it, it’s as bright as anything else as the pleasure explodes inside of her, and her pleasure felt physically around him and across the bond, is enough to send him careening over the edge. And in the moment of tangled bodies, and shared ecstasy, he feels a wall come down in Rey. He doesn’t know if it’s on purpose, or a general loss of control, but cresting on her waves of pleasure he feels every precious thought she holds for him.

And in the second of pure happiness, he does not feel guilt, but he feels what she feels. He watches the pleasure pass over her face and he sees himself as she does; a man, a human man, a human man capable of great evil and great good, a man she trusts and values and loves, a man she wants to see not “fixed” but human in the way he was always supposed to be, a man who, knowing the hell that awaited the reawakening of Ben Solo still chose to join her.

And he doesn’t feel guilt or sadness as she collapses against him and he falls back onto the bed.  He feels the flicker of fear grow in his heart, the desire to flinch against the punishment that fate would surely deal him for daring to have a moment of such unadulterated happiness, but her hair in his face, inhaling the scent of her, he stomps it out. And, he feels like Ben.

*********

He dreams of the day he first starts to train with Snoke. It had been years of coaxing, talking, lurking, grooming, whispering, and promises of power beyond anything he could imagine.  He had been so ready, he had been excited even, to finally be with someone who saw him and understood him.

He didn’t touch a lightsaber, he didn’t meditate, he wasn’t shown all the powers that awaited him; and what had been tender strokes and nudges against the recesses of his mind turned to a full blown assault.

He dreams he is paralyzed by Snoke, as he was that first night. Frozen and helpless as his master stripped bare his fragile psyche. After years of confiding in Snoke, welcoming him into his most vulnerable spots, Snoke knew the most tender places to penetrate.

Fear…anger...rage…they gave power to the dark side, and it feasted on the banquet Snoke was laying before it. He erected every moment of rejection, and loneliness, every look of fear and suspicion, the sight of his uncle’s face bathed in green light in his hut. They replayed over and over again, each time the pictures shifted imperceptibly; they became more brutal, more ugly, more hate fueled, more cruel, they faded and warped so much that he forgot what was reality, and all it did was stoke his rage and devotion to Snoke.

Day after day Snoke ravaged his young mind, burning out traces of Ben Solo.

He cried at first.

He cried for his mother, his father, his uncle; he sobbed and begged Snoke to stop, to make it stop; to cease the sickening sound of Snoke puncturing his psyche over and over and over again.

He sees the twisted face looming over him.                                                                                                                         

“You’re mine,” it taunts. “Ben Solo is dead. You are mine…mine…”

And then…suddenly…the voice stops, for the first time, it stops; Snoke’s face twists in confusion and pain. Snoke starts to gasp and scratch at his throat.

Snoke looks afraid…And it’s intoxicating.  He suddenly can move, loosened from Snoke’s grip. He raises his hand, clenched so tight his whole arm was shaking. He wants him to die…to suffer…he wants Snoke to see the power of the creature he created.

He tightens his grip harder. He can see Snoke’s eyes bulging, his tongues lulling outside of his mouth. He feels a rush of giddy power as Snoke falls to his knees before him.

He hears a crash in the distance, the sound of something breaking, and Snoke begins to fall out of focus. He holds on, he wants to see him die; he wants to see the life leave his eyes. Then he feels something else, the Force pushing at him, pulling him away.

And then another voice; calling out, gasping, “…Ben…Ben…”

His eyes are suddenly open. He’s in his room, it’s dark and he’s up suspended above the bed by the force emanating from Rey. He blinks into the dark; she gasping his name and kicking and thrashing against the mattress. And then he realizes, his fist is clenched tightly.

“Oh God…” he unleashes the fist, he falls back on the bed, and Rey gasps loudly, taking in fresh gulps of air. He is on his knees beside her his hands hovering; he wants to hold her, to check her, but he can’t bring his hands to touch her. He looks at them, even in his sleep they do exactly what they are trained to do, destroy. “Rey…Rey… I’m…I don’t know…I’m so sorry…Rey…”

Rey is shaking next to him, holding her throat; tears escaping from the corner of her closed eyes.

“..Are you…are you okay?”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Rey…what can I…what should I do…do you…do you want me to leave, to go get someone, do you need to go to the med bay…”

He is panicking.

“Rey, just…”

She nods, slowly. Her eyes are still closed and she’s taking deep breathes.

“You’re…do you need anything…what can I do…”

She shakes her head, her breathing has started to slow. But her eyes are still closed, her body clenched, her jaw trembling. He wants to run, he wants to help, but he doesn’t know what to do. Ben Solo is useless and pathetic, he believes for all his faults, Kylo Ren would not panic.

“Rey…” he gasps. “I’m so so sorry. I didn’t…I didn’t mean too. I swear. I was…”

“You had a nightmare…” it comes out breathy and pained, but he’s relieved to hear her talk. He sits up and moves to the end of his bed, his back to her, his head is resting in his hands, clutching his hair.

“Rey, I can’t…I can’t do this…I thought…I thought I was…” he thought he was getting better, he thought things were changing. He feels the bed shift, and then fingers against his shoulder. He jerks, it feels as though he had been burned. He stands and moves away from the bed, away from her. “I could’ve killed you Rey…” It comes out desperate, and ragged. “You could’ve died…I almost…” he feels sick. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Rey stands, but she doesn’t move closer to him.

“You dreamed about Snoke.” It’s not a question. She draws a shaky breath.

“I thought…I…I was killing Snoke…I was…”

“You were so afraid,” she says it, a whisper into the dark. “I could feel it.” Her palm is flat against her chest, feeling her own heartbeat

“You should go,” he wishes he could say it with strength, but it’s shaky and fearful. “You…I’m not safe…”

Rey steps closer to him. She’s still shaking. His eyes linger on her throat, red and scratched from her own hands. He looks away. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t get to make this about himself, but he’s selfish; he’s always been a little selfish.

“Ben,” she says. “Please look at me.”

He does, even in the dark he can see the intensity of her gaze.

“You were afraid, you get to be afraid.”

“But I don’t get to destroy you in the process,” he says, anger laced in his voice. “You don’t get to be another casualty on my quest to redemption…” the last bit flies from his tongue, dripping with sarcasm.

“Hey,” she snaps, voice angry. She steps closer to him. “I am not a maiden in need of defending, Ben Solo.” She looks up at him, her gaze withering and reproachful. “You don’t get to make decisions for me. I’ll decide when it’s too much, I’ll decide if I don’t feel safe.” She moves closer. “If this is too much for you, you have to decide to walk away, and if that’s what you need to do, for you, that’s okay. But don’t give some bantha shit explanation that it’s for my own good.”

She’s right. He wants to run. He wants to run for her sake, and for his. But he doesn’t. Instead, he slowly lifts a hand to her. She looks at it, and then pushes it away, walking straight into his arms, she wraps herself around him. And her hair catches a strangled sob from his lips. She holds him tighter.

“I’m okay, Ben,” she whispers. “I’m okay.”

He feels selfish. He should push her out of the door, but he wants her. He wants her with him, and she wants to be with him too.  Would it be so horrible, so terrible of him, to let her?


	8. The Sound of Redemption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of this one :) Thank you so much for sticking with me and Ben in my first fanfiction experience! Ya'll have made it wonderful.

Propaganda works, he realizes, because it has a grain of truth in it. It makes one able to swallow it, but each time a bigger lie can be mixed in, like poison, little by little, so slowly you can’t even taste it, you don’t even know you’ve been poisoned

It’s how Snoke poisoned his mind. Slowly, after years and years. The things he said, starting off, were true. People were scared of the Vader in him, his mother didn’t know what to do with him, half of his childhood was spent either with household staff or in capital buildings, his father couldn’t be bothered to stick around for much more than a month at a time… all of this was true. None of them were lies.

But they aren’t the whole story.

The whole story is sitting in the cockpit of the Falcon, in his father’s lap, learning how to fly. The whole story is nights where he is lulled to sleep by his mother’s lullabies.  The whole story is him sitting in a senate hall, watching his mother fight for the dignity of all people. The whole story is laying blankets on the balcony, and nights spent tucked between his parents as they told him stories about Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Kessel Run, trash compactors, and Ewoks. The whole story is Luke tentatively reaching out to him in his darkness, only to be pushed away.

His own memories are so soaked in Snoke, he has to fight to see those, to call those into his memory, to determine the bend where they have been warped and manipulated by Snoke. It was exhausting work, trying to tease out reality. So much had to be broken before he could even start.

Maybe that was okay though…maybe he could start to rebuild.

*******

It takes a long time for him to let her share a bed with him again. But she waits. She waits until the night he doesn’t gently urge her out, the night he doesn’t lift his hand from her body, the night he can’t part with the sound of her beating heart.

The first night he doesn’t sleep.  He spends it holding her and listening to her inhale an exhale against his skin. He is tired the next day, but it’s okay.

A few nights later her sleeps a little on accident, bobbing in and out of consciousness. And, again, a few weeks later he sleeps through the night; he dreams still, but he gets used to waking to find her still sleeping beside him, and then he is able to fall asleep again.

One night he dreams of the day she came to him, the day she came to turn him, the day they fought back-to-back in that throne room. He dreams of the moment when Rey’s name drips from Snoke’s tongue, and it causes something incomprehensible to rise inside of him. He dreams of when Snoke’s fingers stroked her face, and he saw the predator, more clearly than he ever had.  He remembers how Snoke whispered his name in the night, and how it echoed in the way he spoke to Rey. He dreams of the moment when Snoke forces himself into Rey’s mind, despite her efforts to stop him. He dreams of that scream…that scream that moved him from conflict to certainty, that unbearable scream of pain.

“The first time hurts the worst…” Snoke had assured him, when he first forced himself into his mind. Rey was given no such warning.

He can hear her scream…raw, feral and filled with rage. He can see her body hanging almost helplessly in the air, almost because she still has her body poised in resistance.

And Snoke, his hand reached out toward her, fingers curling and prying for what he wants…he doesn’t stop him.

When he wakes up, he can’t breathe. He looks around frantically in bed. He’s about to call out her name, but he stops when his hand brushes her shoulder. He immediately retracts it not wanting to wake her.  His heart beat slows and he lowers himself down carefully onto his side, so he’s facing her. He leans in close, listening for her breathe, he lightly touches his finger tips against her jaw and he feels the breath escaping her mouth.

He remembers Snoke, all hands, violation and dripping compliments about her “spunk” her “spit of hope” and her “spirit.”  And he sees him clearly for what he is, but he could not see it himself, against himself.

“Supreme leader is wise,” he had insisted so fervently. How could he have not seen what he was?

He feels guilt, but it’s not overwhelming, and it’s not the loudest thing in his head…he knows it’s not the whole story.

*******

He doesn’t know how it happens that he ends up with friends. It’s slow and he doesn’t notice at first; how Dameron, Finn and Rose all slowly move from a wide berth, to hesitant waves, to forced conversation, to uneasy comfort, and, somehow, to friends.

He isn’t sure they would consider him a friend, not until the day Rey is injured on a mission. It’s Dameron who comes to find him, and he knows right away that something is wrong. He jumps up from where he is meditating, he knows he must look frantic, because Dameron immediately reaches out and grabs his shoulder.

“She’s alive,” Dameron says, hurriedly. “She’s alive…” That doesn’t calm him, because “alive” is the bare minimum, for that to be the go-to comfort, he knows it must be bad. “Close range blaster fire. There was an ambush, Rey has such a huge bounty on her head she was able to lure a lot of them away…but…” He tries to speak, to interrupt, Dameron’s eyes are locked on his. “She’s in the med bay”

He runs in that direction, closely followed by Dameron. He slides to a stop at the window, he can see inside, and he only catches a glimpse of her face, ghostly pale and twisted in pain, even though she’s unconscious.

It’s like a punch to the stomach, and he feels like he’s going to be sick. Dameron is standing next to him, regarding him cautiously, if not surprised. He doesn’t have to probe his mind to know what he’s thinking. He’s surprised, there hasn’t been any yelling or breaking. He’s surprised too.  It’s his instinct in moments like this, how he runs instead of facing- the rage has always been his protection. But it just wasn’t there in the same way it had been.

“Ben…” he looks up at Dameron, whose stepping closer. He sees the wave of compassion and empathy cross his face. “She’ll be okay...”

Ben swallows hard and nods weakly, he feels dizzy and nauseous, like he can’t catch his breathe.

“Hey…” he feels a brotherly hand firmly grip his forearm. “This is it. This is the battle, this is the hard part of loving people.” He takes a deep breathe, and he feels Dameron’s hand on the side of his face, in a gesture of surprising tenderness.

“She’ll be okay…” Ben means it as a statement, but it comes out as a trembling question, a tremble that would have made him wash with shame a few months ago, an admittance that he was looking for something from the Pilot.

“She’ll be okay.” Dameron repeats, with a firm nod.

Ben nods again and lets Dameron pull him into a hug. He thinks they must be friends, because Ben hugs him back.

*******

His mother comes to see him, while he sits at Rey’s bedside- she’s asleep, her body healing and life-giving blood being pumped into her veins. 

Leia stands beside him, as he holds Rey’s hands between his. She looks down at him, he knows he looks a mess, he doesn’t need her sympathetic gaze to remind him of it, unshaved, unkempt, and looking that way in front of her made him feel exposed and uncomfortable.

“How is she doing?”

“Uh, supposedly she’s doing well. The in-field dressing…that’s…that’s what they say saved her.” His voice catches, as he speaks the reality that was so close to being true. He feels her hand on his shoulder and he fights the desire to flinch away, instead he looks straight down at Rey, gaze locked on the place where her lashes meet her cheek.

“This wouldn’t have happened if I had been there.”

She laughs, it’s not at him and it’s not cruel, it’s a tender sad laugh that prompts him to look at her.

“That’s not easy either,” she says, with the shake of her head. “I fought side by side with the love of my life; that poses all of its own challenges. I worried about it when I was with him and I worried when he was away.”

He is tense, it’s the first time she’s mentioned him.

“Did it ever get easier?”

“The worry? No. You learn to manage it but no. I worried about your father until…”

“Until I killed him,” he finishes. He feels her hand on his shoulder shift, slightly, she wants to take it away, but she doesn’t. He wonders if they will ever be able to close the chasm between them, if it’s even possible in light of the truth that caused it.

“Kylo Ren killed him…”

He laughs darkly.

“I am Kylo Ren, mother, no matter how much you don’t want to believe it,” he hopes his tone isn’t cruel, he doesn’t mean to be.

“You’re Ben Solo,” she says softly. “And you’re Kylo Ren. And your neither of those, somehow.” She looks at Rey. “I don’t know how you can be both and how I can live with you being both. But I am trying to figure it out.” She nods softly toward Rey. “And I am forever grateful for the fact that she just knew how.” Leia’s gaze is a thoughtful one and she considers her next words. “She has an inclination to the light of course, but she doesn’t deal in absolutes in the way those who are purely in the light or the dark do.” He knows that is true. “And I am trying to learn, Ben. I am. But right now, when I look at you I have to see just one part of you; my son, Han’s son…” her voice cracks and he fears he may cry, so he can’t look at her. He had always been mercurial and moody; a byproduct of being Han’s son and a Skywalker man, but he can’t remember a time he had ever seen his mother cry.

But all the same, he slowly looks up at her, and the tears pooling at the corner of her eyes, make him balk, but he continues to look at her, clutching Rey’s hand tight.

“I’m so sorry mother…” It’s so small, so small, he had thought, it wasn’t worth saying.  But he knows, Rey must be right, if he spends his life trying to do enough to make up for it all, that’s all he will ever do; all he can do is trust the grace of the people who love him.

His mother’s hand squeezes a little tighter. She lowers herself so her whole arm can reach around her son’s shoulder, holding him. She is sad, and happy, and there’s a playful smirk on her lips.

“I know…”

And he is undone.

*****

He doesn’t let it happen again, and with two-force sensitive warriors on the front line of the fights, with the former Kylo Ren behind X-wing fighters, and his lightsaber cutting down the First Order, the tide does not take long to turn for the light.

He had always been taught that attachments were forbidden. Love made you weak and hate made you strong.

But back-to-back with Rey, protecting her, protecting his friends, his mother, he found, somehow, that he was stronger, faster, smarter then he had ever been with either Luke or Snoke. His focus was clear and sharp when he knew she was with him.

And he thinks of what Rose says all the time, about the way we win; and he thinks it must be true and that there is more wisdom in that then in all the Jedi texts.

********

He never seems to be able to land, quite in the light; but he’s found a comfortable place in the grey, a place that Rey patiently helped him to walk into.

Sometimes there are still nightmares. Sometimes he wakes up frantic and searching for Rey. Sometimes he thinks of how his own son will never know his grandfather, and he begins to hate himself all over again.

But he never quite can. He can’t bring himself to hate who is. Because there is this woman, brave and brilliant and strong who trusts him enough to fall asleep in his arms every night. Because, together, they created this little boy; with dark hair, and dark eyes, who smiles and laughs like his mother, who is kissed and hugged more than any boy in the galaxy, who is sensitive, smart, funny, kind and moody.

A boy with so much of his father’s heart in him.

And he finds, it’s not so hard after all, loving a boy named Ben.

 


End file.
